I've been working lately on some improvements to the AppCenter for app developers as well as normal users and felt that I could give you some update on what features are coming soon.

The first and most noticable one is support for changelogs. This one has been postponed for quite a long time because the old version of AppStream in Loki parses release nodes incorrectly, thanks to +Cody Garver and +Matthias Klumpp we now have the latest version backported to Loki. This allows us to properly display changelogs in AppCenter and their metadata. The app info view will show the difference between your installed version and the one available (all versions between them, it can show maximum of 5 versions). The updates tab will show one, newest release of the app you can update. The app info part is already in master while the UI in the updates tab is a work in progress: https://github.com/elementary/appcenter/pull/445

In the already released version of AppCenter developers can now see how their local AppStream metadata file looks like using the "--load-local" command line argument. Executing "appcenter --load-local path-to-xml-file" will display your application in the main homepage banner so that you can preview how your app looks in AppCenter. The metadata loaded this way will be searchable and you can preview it's main app info page as well.

10.08.2017

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François-Xavier G.: I'm sure we can think of a easier way for the future ;)

François-Xavier G.: +Andrew Rolt which download site ? for instance, i've downloaded Nutty, so in the AppCenter the only options are uninstall or open.

François-Xavier G.: It could be great to donate even if we have the latest version installed. I'm sure to be not the only one to put 0 to test the app, and want to donate when i find the app useful.

Here's what I've been working for the past couple of days: a Picture In Picture plugin for Gala, the elementary's window manager. With it you can choose a particular window that will show a smaller preview on your desktop. The plugin is it's early days, but most of the basic stuff like resizing / repositioning the window works, and is already really useful for me when I code.

The window doesn't have to be a video though, you are allowed to choose whatever window you like and have them as many as you want. You can choose a specific area of a window, or just click to capture it's entire area.

Dániel Antalffy: Absolutely amazing! Even though I might only use it rarely, I will buy it from AppCenter to support your project! :)

Krystian M: It's probably going to be one of my main tools while I work. Great tool.

I would love it if it were a core gala element as it would make pantheon and thus elementary even more unique.

Adam Bieńkowski: +Alain Meza​​ thanks! Yes, definitely. One of the things that still don't work is multi-monitor handling, if you have any ideas about improving the plugin itself, please file them on the GitHub page :)

So I wanted to let you know about some updates to Eddy, the Debian package installer I'm writing for elementary OS.

The app itself is pretty much in a stable state now and it received many new improvements since the initial release. Probably the biggest one is that Eddy is now able to install other types of packages other than .deb files. It is now possible for someone to get it running on e.g: Fedora, and install / uninstall .rpm files thanks to it's PackageKit backend (although the primary focus is still supporting .deb's). Aside from that, the app gained ability to open all the files from your Dowloads folder directly from the Welcome view, which is very helpful on fresh OS installs when you downloaded some .deb files and want to install them right away.

There's also some little improvements like sending notifications on task completion or opening files in Eddy directly from your file manager. One feature I would also like to have in the next release is showing the progress bar on the dock so you don't have to look on the window to know how much progress is left.

Check it out here, if you haven't yet: https://github.com/donadigo/eddy, or if you're running elementary OS, wait for the AppCenter update coming soon to install it ;)

TuxDigital: +Andrey Sigurnjak well rolling packages that are approved and maintained exclusively by Debian. Want something not in the repo? Not going to happen.

Andrey Sigurnjak: Really , another one ? When could it make it to Loki. ? Would that be replacement for Gdebi GUI ? All this cool stuff coming. You should really switch to rolling Debian so we can always have latest and greatest trickling down ! Waiting for cool new stuff is a buzz killer !🖖

Jay Hopkins: I love eOS, Loki is great. I don't want to be critical, but I hope that the team realizes the importance of fixing bugs rather than to keep adding things to the system. Their native apps in particular need to be top notch, because they are a huge part of eOS. Noise cover art issue comes to mind, it's a bummer because Noise is amazing.

Recently a lot of people are reporting a weird issue where after installation AppCenter doesn't display anything in the updates tab and cannot perform any operation in general. The temporary fix is to execute in your terminal: sudo killall packagekitd, and relaunch AppCenter. Just saying it out loud here so anyone that has this problem can fix it themselves. We're still investigating the issue, but it looks like it's some patch that makes PackageKit hang, you can find more information and discussion here: https://github.com/elementary/appcenter/issues/215

Adam Bieńkowski: +Thapelo Radebe​ I won't make the app "listen" to any folder, but for now I've added a button to the welcome view to load all Debian packages from the Downloads folder. Still thinking about it though.

The problem with all these 3 is that they use a utility called "ubuntu-drivers" to retrieve what drivers can be installed on your system. This works well in elementary OS since it's Ubuntu based, but isn't really portable in anyway for other distros and after some discussion with AppStream developers we've decided to not introduce unportable code. Instead we will get drivers directly from AppStream's data which will be both faster and will provide better info you see on the driver page. (The driver metadata also needs to be written by someone because it currently doesn't exist, so it cannot be tested).

In this screenshot you can see that this feature is already working, though as I said it's not an elegant solution. You can also try it out yourself (the drivers-2 branch) if you know how to compile AppCenter's code. You can also read some of the comments by the devs on the merge itself to get into even more detail.

I hope you enjoyed this little post from me and understand the decision :)(If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to ask, I'll try to respond)﻿

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Manuel del Valle: (+1 for the explanation, -1 for a pitiful situation ;)

Adam Bieńkowski: +Manuel del Valle you're right. There is just no data to test upon the implementation. I've already tried simulating this data locally on my system, unfortunately it needs to be provided by some package in order to be valid. Yes, even if I would implement it now, this wouldn't work, and the metadata needs to be written by us or either by someone else like AppStream developers. I'll try to maybe get something set up with the packaging team so maybe I'll actually have the opportunity to test this.

Manuel del Valle: Hey +Adam Bieńkowski thanks for the explanation... Maybe it's just me (I don't really get the technical implications of this, so it may be clear, only I can't see it) but I can't understand what are the next steps...

"we will get drivers directly from AppStream's data"is this already done? is it WIP?

"The driver metadata also needs to be written by someone because it currently doesn't exist"Does it mean that, even when you finish your implementation, it will still not work because you're stuck with empty data sources? Will this be eventually done by you guys or do you need to wait for 3rd parties to do some work here?